Sony’s first annual fan expo launched with a show-of-force reveal of beloved games.

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On Saturday, Sony opened its first-ever PlayStation Experience expo with world premiere footage of fan favorite game series like Uncharted and Final Fantasy and entirely new IP. The expo launched with a show-of-force keynote presentation that reveled in its Sony-first status, complete with a proclamation that the PlayStation 4 was the “fastest-selling game console of all time” and a whopping 25 minutes of Uncharted 4: A Thief’s End gameplay.

That demo was the longest fans had yet seen, and it included astounding visual effects such as dense foliage and startling haze effects (the latter made all the more impressive by how tiny particles glistened in hero Nathan Drake’s flashlight). The core gameplay was otherwise typical Uncharted stuff: climb rock walls, shoot angry guys, sneak through foliage, only far better looking and with tweaks like a grappling hook and melee-specific functions that echo the brutal combat of developer Naughty Dog’s The Last of Us.

The crowd erupted when a Final Fantasy VII logo appeared. Square Enix exec Shinji Hashimoto played a lengthy reveal video of the game’s original PlayStation form and a note indicating “coming to PlayStation 4 in Spring 2015,” but based on the video and Hashimoto’s comments in broken English, we have been led to believe it won’t be remastered, but rather made from the original game’s PC build. So, no, don’t expect updates to the classic’s dated CGI cut scenes.

“We’ve never shown how big No Man’s Sky is before, and we’d like to show that today,” the team from Hello Games declared before loading a spine-tingling, eight-minute gameplay demo of the procedurally generated space-flight sim. The game’s pilot descended upon planet after planet, discovering rich worlds full of sweeping vistas and bizarre creatures at every turn. The footage only reaffirmed our hopes to get our hands on the game at some point next year.

The most impressive new IP came from longtime Sony developer and God of War co-creator David Jaffe, who thanked the crowd for “taking care of my family for 20 years” before pulling the wraps off of Drawn to Death, “a third-person multiplayer shooter that lives in a middle schooler’s sketchbook.” Weapons included a pet dragon with gasoline shoved into its mouth and a super-charged dodgeball, and the aesthetic was all notebook paper and dirty pen lines, so Jaffe appears to be following the middle-school conceit to great lengths. (Your teen overseer’s hand will even drop into the action to help fighters in the game’s default four-player death match battles.) No release date has yet been set, but the game will be playable in its pre-alpha state through the PSX weekend.

A rep from Sony’s San Diego game studio introduced brand-new IP Kill Strain, coming to PlayStation systems in beta form “early next year,” but it was one of the only games shown without any gameplay footage—assumedly because the early game is already live on the PlayStation Expo floor. This weekend, fans can test its “five vs. two vs. five” top-down combat on a show floor packed with over 800 playable kiosks.

Seriously, lots of lists at PSX

That was just one of the expo’s many “launching first on PlayStation” announcements, joined by a startling number of known and unproven series alike. Breathe deep: Darkest Dungeon (a side-scrolling RPG), The Forest (a Rust-like survival-crafting first-person thriller, which looked stunning and terrifying), Persona 5 (a PS4 and PS3 exclusive in both Japan and the West), Orcs Must Die Unchained (a free-to-play update to the active-tower-defense series), Dungeon Defenders II (the sequel to another awesome active-tower-defense series), Skytorn (a side-scrolling, retro-looking blaster), Severed (an old-school RPG from the makers of Guacamelee), Killing Floor 2 (a co-op zombie blaster that looks like a Doom fanboy’s wet dream), and Enter The Dungeon (a top-down gun-blasting game that draws inspiration from the likes of Gunstar Heroes).

Want another list? Sony also announced a slew of already-released games coming to PS4 and PS Vita by summer of next year. Tweaked versions of Shovel Knight and Super Time Force will include Sony-exclusive characters (Kratos and, er, Sony exec Shuhei Yoshida, respectively), and other games include beloved Japanese games Yakuza 5 and Suikoden II and the Double Fine point-and-click trifecta of Broken Age, Grim Fandango, and—announced at PSX—a remastered version of Day of the Tentacle (which will also launch on PC/Mac/Linux, though no release date was mentioned for that one).

February 2015’s biggest PlayStation 4 exclusives, Bloodborne and The Order: 1886, each got their own meaty demo presentations. The former, made by the creators of the notoriously difficult Dead Souls series, received an announcement of a new co-op battle mode called Chalice Dungeon in which friends can team up on procedurally generated dungeons full of super-hard boss-sized baddies. The latter has a 30-minute playable demo on the show floor, full of cinematic bravado and previously unseen melee combat.

Already revealed titles such as Batman: Arkham Knight and Destiny enjoyed some screen time, as well, with reveals of their PlayStation-exclusive content. Sony's hopes to surprise PSX attendees with a Street Fighter V announcement was blown thanks to leaks, but the show made up for it with a world-premiere gameplay reveal. Admittedly, the new gameplay didn't look much different from what we'd seen with Street Fighter IV's ink-inspired designs, as series favorites Ryu and Chun-Li traded blows and used their usual attacks of fireballs and rapid-fire kicks, respectively.

On the weirder, indie spectrum, Sony Santa Monica revealed follow ups from the creators of Katamari Damacy and The Unfinished Swan. Those games, titled Wattam and What Remains of Edith Finch, received vague teasers; the former was whimsical and cartoony, with nothing that resembled real gameplay, while the latter showed off a dark, atmospheric dive into a seaside, lighthouse town. Sony Santa Monica also took the opportunity to unveil Fat Princess Adventures, whose brief gameplay reveal looked like a four-player co-op action-RPG with the same control scheme as the PS3 original.

The keynote was loaded with Sony fanboy love, particularly a “20 years of PlayStation” retrospective that recreated scenes from classic Sony games within the LittleBigPlanet 3 engine (the papercraft Shadow of the Colossus was a nice touch). At keynote’s end, Sony opened the floodgates to a giant room of playable games, so we’re rushing into there to play the weirdest and newest stuff coming to PlayStation in the next year. Expect tons of impressions through this week.